Michael Leinbach - Bringing Columbia Home - The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew

In the late morning, the incident command team decided to recall the teams led by the Forest Service. The searchers felt angry and betrayed to be pulled in from the field. The National Guard, better prepared for the conditions, continued searching. [26] Cohrs, “Notes,” 8.

Roger and Belinda Gay had been sleeping at the VFW hall every night since the shuttle accident. They rose at three o’clock every morning to begin cooking eggs for the searchers. Today, the Gays and their helpers cracked and cooked more than 2,500 eggs.

Volunteers from the community continued to donate food. People brought in whatever they could. An elderly gentleman whose wife was bedridden prepared a plate of fried chicken and brought it to the VFW. When he saw the throngs of searchers at the hall, he said, “This ain’t gonna be enough to feed anybody.” Belinda Gay told him, “It’s the little things that make the big picture happen. Had you not brought that chicken, those three men over there might not have gotten to eat today.”

One woman of modest means brought in a cooked chicken, and she apologized profusely that it was all she could spare. She appeared impoverished, so the searchers took up a donation and purchased groceries for her to ensure that she had enough to eat.

Someone delivered a sheet cake decorated as an American flag with the names of the STS-107 crew. No one would serve it. Eventually it was covered with plastic wrap and put on display.

Pat Smith, an employee at the Shelby Savings Bank, appealed to her manager to help feed the searchers. They purchased several cases of fried chicken from the grocery store. As she and her manager drove up to the VFW hall to deliver their donation, they were astounded at the line of cars ahead of them and “little old ladies getting out with their peas, their dumplings, their corn bread, and their cakes. They’d just deliver it and drive on out.” Smith broke into tears when she saw firsthand the outpouring of support in the community.

Third grade teacher Sunny Whittington felt guilty about not being able to help out in some significant way after hearing her students tell about their parents’ volunteering. As she drove to work, she stopped at the grocery store and purchased supplies for making sandwiches. Her teaching partner saw her unloading her truck at the school and asked what she was up to. “We’re going to make sandwiches!” she said. “School isn’t just about reading and writing and math. It’s about life.” Her colleague immediately offered to have her class help, and then called her husband to purchase more food. The children in the two classes made more than five hundred sandwiches that day.

While the searchers appreciated the kids’ offerings, what touched them most was that a child’s handwritten note of encouragement and support accompanied each sandwich. Many of the volunteers and National Guardsmen wrote letters back to the school to thank the kids. Even today, searchers weep when recalling how deeply moved they were by what the students of the elementary school did for them.

Despite the community’s seemingly endless capacity for good works, it was quickly becoming apparent the VFW could not continue to rely solely on the generosity of the local populace. The perishable food being brought in overwhelmed the storage capacity of the VFW’s refrigerators and freezers. Health issues from unsafe food were a concern.

Sheriff Maddox called his friend Jerry Powell at Tyson Foods to ask for a loaner refrigeration unit. Powell said, “It’s on its way. Do you need any food?” Maddox replied that they would gratefully accept anything Tyson could offer. Powell sent a freezer truck full of frozen chickens along with the refrigerators. A group from Gregg County brought steam tables to the VFW hall and began preparing hot food—a service they performed for the following week. [27] Starr, Finding Heroes , 182.

The VFW hall had three serving lines, feeding more than one thousand people three times per day. There was so much food and so many searchers on hand that the volunteers had to feed people in shifts.

Hivie McCowan—the widow who had been afraid to look for debris in her pasture several days earlier—volunteered as a food server at the VFW hall. “To let them know what I was serving, I kept saying, ‘Sweet tea? Sweet tea?’ I’d said it so long that after a while, they just started calling me ‘Sweet Tea.’ It was awesome!”

And much to the relief of the early morning food service volunteers, the McDonalds in Jasper announced they would start sending prepared breakfast meals.

Astronauts Jim Wetherbee, Jerry Ross, John Grunsfeld, and Scott Horowitz tried to refine the search area for the crew’s remains and the critical components inside the crew module. They were attempting to reconcile conflicting data, analyses, and speculation about how the crew module might have come apart and how winds aloft might have carried the remains and debris in various directions. It was confounding their attempt to narrow the search path.

Ultimately, Wetherbee and Ross told their teams to rely on the “ground truth,” analyzing only the data for the items that had made it to the ground. A glove here, a helmet there—these were the physical evidence of how Columbia actually fell to earth. Their analyses, aided by geospatial staff at Stephen F. Austin State University, further narrowed the search path that day. They subsequently helped to target searches to precise areas where there was a high likelihood of locating remains of the crew. [28] Interviews with Jerry Ross and Jim Wetherbee; ESRI, “Space Shuttle Columbia Debris Recovery Enhanced with GIS,” Summer 2003, www.esri.com/news/arcnews/summer03articles/space-shuttle.html .

That evening, Brent Jett met with Cohrs and informed him that NASA wanted to realign the search centerline from the original one that Cohrs had drawn using the satellite imagery and the location of crew remains. Grunsfeld’s analysis of GPS locations in the debris field enabled NASA to further narrow the search corridor for Columbia ’s crew to an area one mile wide by twenty-five miles long. NASA thought the actual debris trajectory was four degrees different in azimuth from Cohrs’s original projected line. Cohrs narrowed and realigned the next day’s search area in Sabine County to correspond with NASA’s analysis.

As February 7 dawned, Texas had 430 state employees active in the recovery. There were eight hundred National Guard troops on search duty. Louisiana had more than 175 state employees on search duty. [29] FEMA, “FEMA Updates Search, Find and Secure Activities for Columbia Investigation,” news release 3171-13, February 7, 2003.

Johnson Space Center encouraged its staff to volunteer to help in the search effort—but they would have to take personal leave to participate. Many JSC flight controllers, engineers, and other government and contractor personnel did take leave to help with the search, out of a sense of loyalty to their fallen friends and to America’s space program. Six days after the accident, several JSC employees were on hand in Hemphill’s VFW hall.

Greg Cohrs had about 650 people to put in the field in Sabine County this cold, showery morning, including six teams led by Forest Service staff, 230 National Guardsmen, fifteen mounted searchers from the Department of Criminal Justice, the eighty people on the Native American fire crews, thirteen dispatch teams, and six canine search teams. As the morning progressed, cold rain lessened in intensity and sky conditions improved, allowing aerial searches to begin again.